Since 2,000, the Democrats have lost the presidency to
George W. Bush and Donald Trump. I’ll just pause for a moment while you
contemplate the degree of losertude required to accomplish such failure. George
Bush could not win at Who’s Smarter Than A 1st Grader, while Donald
Trump shouldn’t even be allowed in the same room as children. If either one of
them was to be on Dancing With The Stars, he’d be the first one to be voted
off. If they were on The Dating Game, they wouldn’t be picked even if the third
contestant was Richard Speck and the woman doing the choosing was a nursing
student. If the two of them played Trivial Pursuit, they couldn’t beat your
cat.
Go ahead, imagine for a moment how that game might go down,
imagine Trump and W. sitting around a dinner table, you might as well throw in
Sarah Palin for good measure. True, Sarah lost in 2008, but it was only because
the nation was in the midst of a financial meltdown the likes of which we have not seen
in nearly 80 years.
First of all, you know one of them is going to call it the
Genius Edition and none of the
others is going to correct him (with the possible exception of your cat). Imagine
too the conversation as they struggle to pronounce words and names such as
pharmaceutical, isthmus, Medici, Diogenes, and Francois Mitterand. You can just
hear Palin massacre the name of Charlemagne and Trump correcting her with
something even worse, can’t you?
Imagine the response you’d get to a question like “What
black author wrote Another Country and Nobody Knows My Name?” Or “What U.S.
president declared ‘The ballot is stronger than the bullet?’” Or “How many
stripes did the flag first called The Star Spangled Banner have?” Or “What was
stormed in Paris in 1789?”
Just close your eyes and it is easy to visualize them
studiously avoiding the categories of History, Arts And Literature, Geography,
and Science And Nature, hoping instead to get lucky with a Sports or
Entertainment question.
And you just know, two hours into the game, that when they
are on Roll Again and they roll a 4, they’re still going to have to count it
out to get to the other Roll Again. Of course, long before then, they’ll
already be blaming others for their abysmal inability to get a single slice of
pie. Sarah will be accusing the creators of the game of being Ivy League
liberals while Trump will be saying the answer is not right while providing no
evidence that he even understood the question. It will be accompanied all the
while by W.’s patented idiot chuckle as he sits and grins and time after time
grabs the die, believing it is his turn when it is not. And should one of them
whine their way or connive their way into a slice of pie, they’ll put it in
sideways and you’ll end up the next day trying to pull it out with a pair of
tweezers, all the while cursing their names.
Now imagine losing to that.
Imagine being on the side that actually knew many of the
answers to those questions and yet losing to the others in election after
election.
If you were laughing at the earlier descriptions of Trump,
W., and Sarah, I’m guessing you’re not laughing now. Doesn’t that warrant a
long, hard look in the mirror? Doesn’t that make you stop dead in your tracks
and question your most basic assumptions of the world you are living in?
You can blame other people, I suppose. You can blame all the
people who voted for Donald Trump and call them stupid and evil. You can hate
people who didn’t see things your way and hope they all die and have their jobs
exported or eliminated by technology. It sounds a lot like the very thing you
say you oppose, but you could do that. You can blame the Russians, it’s quite
tempting, although I don’t see how even Putin would find Donald Trump someone he’d
want with keys to a nuclear arsenal. You can blame the Bernie Bros, assigning them a label in
order to stereotype and denigrate them.
There’s a lot of things and people you can blame for the
fact that Hillary Clinton lost, for the fact that Democrats are consistently
losing to candidates that look and smell like something that just crawled of
your toilet. But winners don’t blame others, losers do. Winners take honest
stock of what they’ve done wrong in order that they can stop doing that and do
something better. I haven’t seen a single hopeful sign of that happening.
Oh sure, Democrats have unveiled a new game plan. As I recall,
they also had a game plan in 2,000 and 2,016, too. They had boatloads of
strategists, advertising agents, propagandists, spinmeisters—whatever you want
to call them—figuring out how to best project their candidate in order to match with
focus groups in ways that would connect (I could have probably phrased that
better to sound more like those kind of people, but I have rejected walking
down that path even if only to understand and mimic it). Democrats spent $10
for every vote for their candidate, and still couldn’t win against a meaner,
cruder version of Uncle Buck.
But the Democrats have revealed that they have found their
problem and are working to improve it. It was not that there was anything wrong
with their platform, it was that they weren’t doing a good job of communicating
their message. $1.2 billion dollars on campaign funding for Hillary’s campaign.
Able to buy the most brilliant and evil story tellers. Those guys who sell
diabetes to children and cancer to smokers, they could not sell your product.
The Democrats say they have not been doing a good job of
getting their message out, the obvious implication being that George W. and
Donald Trump were masterful communicators. Let’s face it, the Democrats don’t
want to change their product—and let’s face it, product is the right word—they want
to change the packaging.
The Democrats won’t change, they can’t change. They can’t
change because they are a corporation that exists only to make a profit for its
shareholders. If a candidate is good at selling the product that shareholders
want to sell, they’ll make a lot of money. If someone actually questions the
mission statement they’ll be out the door without a severance package.
The Democrats can’t win, either. They can’t win because they
are only a diluted version of the Republicans. They are Bud Light compared to
Bud, and most people, if they like drinking mass-produced fizz-water, will
choose the real thing. Changing the name to America isn’t going to make it more
palatable, nor does it make it a real alternative.
It doesn’t matter to the shareholders whether the Democrats
win or lose, because they own the competition as well. If the Democrats win,
they’ll make money, but if the Democrats lose, they’ll make more. And all those
micro-breweries trying to provide an alternative to the big guys? They’re
systematically being squeezed off the shelf or bought out. So much for choice.
But the game goes on, until enough people refuse to play it.
Donald will continue to “accidentally” move his pie three spaces instead of two
and get away with it because that’s the rules that have been determined. The
precedent has been set, the game has been crooked for so long there are no
rules anyone adheres to anymore. Trump is merely the most grievous example of a
game we should never have agreed to play.
We should have walked away a long time ago, insisted on more
accountability, insisted someone with integrity be allowed to hold onto the
rule book. But as long as we were able to get our slice of pie, we allowed it
to happen. But now all the pieces of pie have been handed out, some people
having more pieces than will ever fit in their pie while others, smart and
hard-working though they be, have nothing. Like the Wheel of Samsara, still the game goes on.
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